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L'absent de Paris: In the Savage Country

L'absent de Paris: In the Savage Country inquiry-world that combines dialectics and erudition. As a historian of religion he marshaled extensive knowledge of Western languages and clerical practices to study unnameable phenomena, especially religious experience, which he felt at once pathetic, totalizing, and idiotic: an experience, in other words, vital for our relations with the unknown. Events, as he demonstrated through his study of mystical behavior and the science he baptized mystics (in line with chemistry and physics), can only be shown (and never quite stated) by what stirs ‘‘language through a torment of the ineffable.’’ 1 On even a cursory glance the sum of Certeau’s work astonishes and dazzles. Whatever it tackles—glossolalia, the ‘‘idiot’’ as mystic, the bumpkin, or the encounter with Native Americans in the Western Hemisphere—seems to defy knowledge as a whole. Everywhere the reader of Certeau also encounters an extraordinary humility that brushes aside the true erudition informing the history of the French mystic, state reason and public piety in the classical regime, or the politics of vernacular languages at the time of the French The South Atlantic Quarterly :, Spring . Copyright ©  by Duke University Press. Tseng 2002.1.30 18:38 6516 THE SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY 100:2 / sheet 258 http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png South Atlantic Quarterly Duke University Press

L'absent de Paris: In the Savage Country

Conley, Tom
South Atlantic Quarterly , Volume 100 (2) – Apr 1, 2001
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References (13)

Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 2001 by Duke University Press
ISSN
0038-2876
eISSN
1527-8026
DOI
10.1215/00382876-100-2-575
Publisher site
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Abstract

inquiry-world that combines dialectics and erudition. As a historian of religion he marshaled extensive knowledge of Western languages and clerical practices to study unnameable phenomena, especially religious experience, which he felt at once pathetic, totalizing, and idiotic: an experience, in other words, vital for our relations with the unknown. Events, as he demonstrated through his study of mystical behavior and the science he baptized mystics (in line with chemistry and physics), can only be shown (and never quite stated) by what stirs ‘‘language through a torment of the ineffable.’’ 1 On even a cursory glance the sum of Certeau’s work astonishes and dazzles. Whatever it tackles—glossolalia, the ‘‘idiot’’ as mystic, the bumpkin, or the encounter with Native Americans in the Western Hemisphere—seems to defy knowledge as a whole. Everywhere the reader of Certeau also encounters an extraordinary humility that brushes aside the true erudition informing the history of the French mystic, state reason and public piety in the classical regime, or the politics of vernacular languages at the time of the French The South Atlantic Quarterly :, Spring . Copyright ©  by Duke University Press. Tseng 2002.1.30 18:38 6516 THE SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY 100:2 / sheet 258

Journal

South Atlantic Quarterly – Duke University Press

Published: Apr 1, 2001

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